First Light

I am the strangest person you will ever meet.

I LIKE getting up before anyone else on the weekends. I like the fact that I wake up early, and the whole world is standing still. Early weekend mornings make anywhere seem magically like it belongs only to me. A particularly cherished morning memory is of walking to church on the Upper West Side in Manhattan one Sunday morning (8:30 is early for Manhattan, after all!), watching the joggers and the first light flooding Central Park West, and thinking, "If Manhattan was like this all the time, I could live here." (Still, at stretch, but it was a beautiful walk, nonetheless).

I'm not sleeping much lately (anyone surprised?), so yesterday morning I got up and made Blubeberry and Cornmeal pancakes. Himself had to take the Hoopty to the other side of the valley to get new plates (brilliant budget-saving move, there is one DMV open in the ENTIRE STATE on Saturdays). The horrid fans were so loud yoga was out of the question, so I decided to go walking instead.

I started the sprinklers on the front and back lawns (it's our turn to be in charge of keeping the lawn from dying), and set out through the neighborhood. I reveled in the just-warm-enough sunshine, the fact that the streets were nearly silent, that the whole world was waiting, perched on the brink of awakening from it's Friday-night slumber. I immediately noticed that the contingency of early-morning walkers in The Frontier are different than they were in Virginia. In VA, if you made eye contact and were on the same side of the street as someone, you said, "hello." If you didn't feel like greeting, you avoided eye contact. In The Frontier, if you are within shouting distance of any human being who appears to not be an axe murderer, they say hello to you and comment on the weather (or your pregnancy - I got so many "good for yous!" I'm not sure what to think of it).

In Virginia talking to strangers always made me feel weird, like one of us had somehow accidentally invaded the other's space. But yesterday I felt happy - happy to be part of a neighborhood, to actually recognize a few souls out walking or watering their yards, happy to have someone say "hello," since I know so few people.

The day continued on, blessed by the morning's endowment of beautiful summer weather and the magic of being among the first to experience it. At some point today, I realized why the weekend had felt so wonderful - and it wasn't just the fact that I had been up since first light on Saturday - I realized that, even though I have "lived" in The Frontier now for 2 1/2 months, this weekend was the first weekend that Himself and I have spent, together, alone, in a VERY long time (and, ironically, one of the last, as Baby Girl can technically arrive at almost any point from here on out).

We did nothing fantastic - we ran errands, cleaned, read and spent all of today hiding in the den from the humming of the maddening fans, but the entire weekend had the same, "I'm on top of the world" glow as the early morning walk on Saturday.

All is well.